Opinion The state, urban India and the fear of the ‘foreigner’ that will hurt us all

There is, however, a new kind of urban fear that haunts Indian cities, one that now circulates, ghostlike, in their poorest localities. It is driven by a mixture of deliberately manufactured rumours and arbitrary actions against the most vulnerable. In cities such as Gurugram, despite official assurances, Bengali-speaking populations — part of the section that services the gated communities — now live in fear of wanton state action. Families have decided to book train tickets for young men to travel back to their villages in West Bengal as they are most likely to be the first to be picked up for questioning and worse.

This new version of urban fear targets the city’s most vulnerable, those who cannot retreat to the comforts and apparent security of a gated community. The threats that they face are real ones, those that characterise the everyday violence of life for the poor in our cities. When such threats become intolerable and inescapable, their only choice is to return to the places of their origin: Travelling hundreds of kilometres to return to your village — and the massive dislocation this involves in terms of family life and livelihoods — is the only realistic option. However, what does urban fear that arises in the wake of a “foreigners” scare do to the life of cities and the idea of cities as the engines of growth and prosperity? Beginning in 2015, the central government’s Smart Cities Mission has invested thousands of crores of rupees in a variety of infrastructural projects. The new form of urban fear, generated by state bodies and rarely contested by citizens with the capacity to do so, threatens to undermine whatever the claims to “smartness” we may make.

First, the promulgation of urban fear as a state initiative — which is different from that imagined by residents of gated communities — damages the basis of trust in the state. Whether we like it or not, it isn’t so much constitutional guidelines that determine the everyday political and social lives of citizens. For the vast majority, it is the state in its everyday acts that is both the means and the end. The most common way in which acts of governance are experienced and evaluated is through spectacle and performance of governance rather than ideas of constitutional obligations. If fear is the key manner in which the state is experienced — identifying any one section of the population as “dangerous” — then this fundamentally undermines the aims of state-ness itself. It eats away at the idea of the state, which is fundamental to the functioning of any democracy.

In as much as the present version of state-fuelled urban fear affects the urban poor — primarily linguistic and religious minorities — it contains an extraordinary irony. For the populations that are being driven back to their villages are precisely those who have the greatest trust in the state. The section of the urban population that has retreated into gated communities is largely mistrustful of the state, votes in elections in diminishing numbers and favours privatisation of many of the activities undertaken by the state. The greatest support for state action and policy comes, actually, from those who are currently being displaced from the cities they service, help to build and have occupied for long periods.

There are two consequences of the urban fear that currently affects the most marginalised sections of the urban population. Both suggest the making of urban dystopias. First, not only does it diminish the lives of a substantial portion of its citizens without reason but also reduces the diversity of opinions that make for actually smart cities. State-sponsored public welfare is an important corrective to the unchecked promotion of private capital. There are certain areas — education and health, for example — where state action can lead to far greater public good than that possible through private capital. Similarly, genuinely public spaces in cities can only result from state action. Around the world, the best functioning cities are those that have a judicious mix of public and private action in their everyday lives. Through displacing its strongest supporters, the state undermines its own presence, legitimised through the support of the citizens it is complicit in banishing from cities.

Second, the better off — who do not feel the need to protest or question — will also find themselves subject to arbitrary state action and the fear it creates. State action is crucially tied to precedence: Once arbitrariness is allowed in one sphere, it becomes the state’s second nature. Those who currently feel that what is happening to the urban poor cannot happen to them should carefully consider the fact that while walls and gates may save them from their imagined enemies, the logic of the state is quite different. Walled utopias are not as hardy as imagined.